By William Snowden
David Alexander rides to raise awareness of teen suicide
By WILLIAM SNOWDEN
wsnowden@thewakullanews.net
David Alexander has traveled more than 6,551 miles over the past nine months on bicycles.
His goal is to raise awareness of the problem of teen suicide. His 17-year-old daughter killed herself.
At a convenience store north of Crawfordville recently, the soft-spoken Alexander, his face sunburned, dressed in a Denver Broncos sweatshirt, shared his story, telling of the sudden shock he suffered last year when his 17-year-old daughter Angela took her own life – "over a boy," he adds with a sad shake of his head.
He and his other daughter, Ivy, who turns 12 this March, didn't know what to do. They went for a long bike ride. She wrote a card to Angela and tied it to a balloon and let it go in hopes it would float up to her.
Alexander continued riding.
"I don't really know what to do other than this," he said. His goal is to make parents aware of the problem, and convince teens that there are other ways of dealing with their problems.
He has journals from his travels – he has collected more than 3,000 signatures from people he's met along the way. He started his bike ride in Michigan.
He hands out flyers at his stops, that tell Angela's story. There have been setbacks along the way: his bike was stolen in Philadelphia. When a TV station did a story on him and his stolen bike, a retail store donated a bike for him. A church in Savannah bought him a better road bike and a bike trailer.
His goal on this afternoon in Crawfordville is to make it to the coast. Then he'll head west along the Gulf.
His 12-year-old, who lives with family in Massachusetts, is planning to join him during the summer and they will ride across Texas together.
Attached to the counter of the convenience store is a flyer advertising a meeting of a local group concerned about the drastic increase in suicides in Wakulla County. The suicide rate has tripled.
Parents, listen to your children, Alexander says.
"Talk to your children, please, before they make a mistake like Angela did," he says. "Share your feelings together."
His mounts his bike and rides off, headed south.
"It's amazing what God does," he wrote on one of his flyers. "I think I'm healing as a person and as a father."
